


Does This Skin Fit Funny?

by Thassalia



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/M, Grief, Ice Cream, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Survivor Guilt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-28
Updated: 2019-04-28
Packaged: 2020-02-08 17:23:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,616
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18627811
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thassalia/pseuds/Thassalia
Summary: It was a simple equation: Two years as the Hulk versus less than two months as himself again. It doesn’t balance, not yet.Natasha doesn’t even have that excuse.The world fell apart.  Everyone grieves differently.





	Does This Skin Fit Funny?

**Author's Note:**

> I spent a year trying to write a response to Infinity War. This is the one that finally stuck. Thank you as always to Feldman. Really, for everything.

The pain is sudden, sharp and bright and clean, a slice of blade whispering against her skin. She’d blocked the attack, but let her partner get in too close. Natasha stills her own answering blow just in time, wrenching her shoulder to halt the momentum as the wide eyed horror on the girl’s face cuts through the foggy haze.

“Enough!”

She hears Okoye bark the order, breathes through the pain, pulls herself out of the fighting stance to parade rest.

The young woman gasps as blood trickles down Natasha’s cheek. She plants her spear, standing at attention as the General approaches. Natasha touches the cut, the blood on her fingertips is warm and wet and very red.

Okoye gives the other trainees standing in a circle around them the signal to move away, reform and begin another exercise, then turns her attention to Natasha and her trainee.

“It was my own mistake,” Natasha waves her hand dismissively and the girl purses her mouth, gaze darting between Natasha and her leader.

“Yes,” Okoye says, “It was. And one of my recruits could have been hurt because of it.”

The Dora who struck her stands rigid, horror in her eyes.

“Ife, go,” Okoye orders, pointing, offering just enough eyeroll to diffuse the situation for her pupil. “You are fine, she is fine. Put down your spear, observe the side guards. Get your bearings.”

Okoye tilts her head, peering at the cut on Natasha’s cheek. Ife is still standing there, fingers tight on her weapon. “Now,” Okoye’s voice is brusque.

“You,” she points at Natasha. “Go get that cleaned up. I think you’re done for today.”

“It’s nothing.”

“The exercise is about control. You pushed her too hard, and she lost control. She needs to practice, and you need to demonstrate to her that there are consequences to recklessness. Go. We will discuss you returning when your control is...better.”

Natasha rolls her lips, bristling. The anger at the dressing down rising up in her. She’s no longer a child soldier in the Red Room, she’s no longer a lone combatant on a field full of alien blood, she’s….also not in charge here and Okoye’s tone is neither argumentative nor condescending.

Natasha takes a deep breath. She snaps her staff back into individual batons, returns them to her armor and leaves. The tremor in her hands has more to do with a lack of calories, surely, then the adrenaline sputtering out inside of her.

The raccoon is sitting next to Rhodes, drinking coffee. He ignores her even as Jim looks up and says, “You’ve got something on your face.”

She doesn’t respond. It wasn’t worth seeking out medical attention for the cut. She cleaned it, applied antibiotic cream. It will heal. She sits with her own coffee and breakfast.

“Not gonna elaborate,” Jim says, like it’s a given.

“Training incident,” she says, tries to summon up a wry smile but his gaze is shrewd. Of course, he’s trained with her, has more of a sense of the rarity of such a thing.

“You’re a bad liar,” the raccoon says, looking up, muzzle covered in something sticky. She works hard not to curl her lip and doesn’t bother to correct him. He gets up from the table with a look at her like she makes him nervous and busses his own dishes.

Thor sits down next to her, but doesn’t comment on the injury.

“Your furry friend doesn’t like me,” she says lightly.

“You unsettle him,” Thor says, gentle.

She’s a little stung. She’d expected him to say that Rocket hates everyone, which had been a type of running joke.

“I unsettle _him_?”

Thor sips deeply like it’s a given.

“Yeah, well,” she says, and pushes her plate away.

“Seriously, Nat,” Jim says, giving Thor a side-eye that Natasha can’t quite decipher, “you okay?”

She shrugs. “It’s just a scratch, but I think I’m in danger of losing my TA job.”

Rhodes takes a deep breath. “Not a bad thing, right?”

She honestly doesn’t know. “They’re refilling their ranks. I’m superfluous anyway.”

Rhodes and Thor exchange another glance, but don’t say anything as Steve comes in.

His shoulders are bent with exhaustion. He gives them all a head tip before noticing Natasha’s cheek “Jesus, Nat.”

“It’s a scratch, Steve. I’m fine,” she says, guilt racking her suddenly.

Thor tenses beside her and Jim looks into his cup. It’s too much, suddenly, and she gets up, dumps out her coffee. “I’ll just leave you all to it, then.”

***

“Dance with us, come come.” He doesn’t hear the request at first, music pounding in his ears as he watches others moving and talking and writhing amongst fire pits and a makeshift bar. The speakers are state of the art. It’s still easy to get things like that here in Johannesburg. Bruce likes the view, the feeling of being amongst people but not too close.

The parties are in alleys sometimes, in tents, in parts of the city that used to mean robbery and assault and death and are now gravesites, mourning stones. In the rural areas, it was the same -- barley beer and roasted goat, fermented grains and honeyed rice. Dancing, singing, grieving.

He suspects it’s like this everywhere.

Before, he’d have stayed apart, sipping something by the fire, in a corner, in the place where he’d lay down at night alone.

But now, he can stand in the thick of it, eyes closed, music beating around his body, noise and chaos and lust and rage and longing, and it just feels like his heartbeat.

When someone touches his arm, he looks up. A woman with short mahogany curls, bleached red at the ends is gesturing frantically.

“Come on!”

He doesn’t know her but behind her ChiChi Amadi’s wide lovely grin is something he’s come to recognize. Amongst the many young Wakandan doctors who have been welcoming, ChiChi is the closest to him in age. Meaning she’s still barely 30, but bright and excellent with patients and staff.

“You never dance, Bruce,” she shouts. “It won’t hurt you.”

He wants to giggle. If only they knew. But Hulk doesn’t give a shit about dancing. Didn’t before. Really doesn’t now, with the press of bodies, and the lack of personal space, so much to go wrong and suddenly Bruce is safe to make an ass of himself all on his own.

“You say that,” he hedges, “But we don’t have any proof that me flopping around like a muppet won’t lead to further insult or injury.”

The woman he doesn’t know cocks her head in confusion. “What is a muppet?” she shouts over the crowd and ChiChi bursts into laughter.

“You cannot be that bad.”

She introduces Adoya, a colleague here in Johannesburg. She will be joining the rotation at Netcare the following Monday, but knows enough people to have heard about the parties.

“You should dance with us,” Adoya says, “Not sit here, sipping a drink like an old man.”

“I am an old man,” Bruce says, only half kidding.

Adoya gives him an assessing gaze, moving her hips and reaching out to ChiChi who then hauls him up. Bruce struggles to remember how to keep a beat.

A few minutes later, ChiChi leans in and says, “You really are that bad.”

He laughs, chest warm with whatever had been in the three drinks he’d consumed, with the weird and wild luxury of being here amongst these young people.

Dancing.

***

Natasha doesn’t see the others for the rest of the day. Instead, she spends it camped out in a small room with the bounty of Wakanda’s communication stores and mainframes at her disposal.

She’s sifted intel and analyzed patterns with typewritten onion skin and ancient telegrams in the past. The largesse of this equipment isn’t lost on her, but data is data.

She mines through arrays and conversations, news stories and forum posts. Kill half the population, but someone out there still needs to be wrong on the internet.

Despite her best judgement, she accessed the state department files. Their arrest orders have yet to be overturned. Odds are, no one would stop them if they officially returned to the US right now, but while there was still work to do— work for Steve and Thor at least—it hasn’t seemed worth the risk.

She has any number of ways of going where she wants without getting caught, but she hasn’t. The thought alone feels like a betrayal.

So she stays. Trains. Bides her time. Keeps an eye on her team. Tries to keep it together.

She works until she can’t stand it anymore, and eats dinner alone. She heads back to the Dora Milaje barracks. When Okoye had asked her to assist with training as they regrouped, she had also made it clear that while on duty, they were housed in the palace. Natasha would be expected to bunk down with the others.

She has a roommate, Nombeko, a tall, quiet woman recently promoted to the Queen’s guard. Two of Nombeko’s brothers were lost to Thanos -- one to the snap, one to the battle. The room normally houses four soldiers, beds and wardrobes with a small open area with a couch and a retracting media screen plus an ensuite bathroom. After sleeping in shitty safehouses for two years, the dormitory style room feels luxurious.

Nombeko has a slight weakness for heeled sandals and they line the bottom of her wardrobe. Small trinkets and photos are artfully arranged on the decorative bureau giving an artful warmth to the space.

The other two beds have been abandoned, their former occupants gone and their things gathering dust.

Natasha’s space lacks the dust, but little else suggests she’s been there for a monch. She only has the lone bag she’d been living out of since joining Steve and Sam and Wanda as a fugitive. Her clothes and weapons remain within it, stashed in the corner of her own wardrobe.

Nombeko is there when Natasha comes in, reading on the loveseat, hand curled around a cup of steaming tea, a rooibos her mother sends her regularly. It reminds her of Wanda, tucked under a quilt on a threadbare couch in Novigrad and the ache is sudden and awful.

She looks up at Natasha, greeting her politely.

“Would you like tea?”

It’s a gesture of friendship, one Natasha has rarely accepted. She knows it makes her seem churlish. The customs are clear about how rude it is to refuse food. It isn’t that she wouldn’t welcome the tea, but she can’t, at this moment, wrap her mind around sitting down on the burnt umber couch to gossip gently about the people they have in common.

Pressure bears down on Natasha -- pressure to succeed, to flee, to get out there and find Clint, to call Bruce, to send some sort of signal out there in the universe to Stark. To do something. Anything. She wouldn’t even know where to start though, because Steve is still here, still broken.

She shakes her head. “Thank you, but no. I’m due to meet the General in a few.”

If Nombeko looks relieved, Natasha pretends not to notice.

***

He’s fetching bottles of water when the commotion starts.

Something stirs in him, the itch under his skin, the hairs on the back of his neck rising. Fight or flee? As a kid, he couldn’t stay out of fights. And then. And then.

But this isn’t a fight yet. It’s just a tall guy with an arm wrapped around Adoya as the music continues to play and bodies move. She’s still smiling, trying to extract herself, but the man isn’t letting go.

ChiChi gets in his face, warm and calm, all conciliatory smiles. Bruce is too far away to hear what’s going on, but smiles or not he recognizes tension in the body language of the two women.

The guy is bigger than he is. Bruce pauses, assesses, waits for the telltales that indicate involvement on his part will end badly.

There aren’t any.

It’s a gut punch, sure. But also, euphoria. Bruce is loose and a little drunk. He knows this. His judgement is compromised, just a little.

And there’s nothing that says this is going to end in fists and tears (oh please, that dark part of him that he used to call Hulk growls, let it end in fists and tears).

He moves into the circle, holding up water. ChiChi grabs one gratefully, but the guy pushes further into Adoya’s space and she turns from him.

He reaches for her again, and Bruce stops his hand.

“Hey man,” he says, “I think she’d rather not.”

He looks for Adoya’s confirmation. He doesn’t want to overstep. She moves further away and Bruce feels like he made the right call.

Except the guy is drunker than he looks, reaches out for her again, and Bruce puts his hand on the guy's chest, not shoving exactly, but putting enough weight into the gesture that the guy is going to have to make a decision.

“Move, dickhead,” he says to Bruce.

“Rude,” he says.

The guy swings, Bruce ducks but not fast enough. The meaty fist clips his face. He doesn’t bother with his fists, kicks the guy in the side of the knee. He buckles, flails, catches Bruce in the ribs hard enough that he gulps for air as he elbows the man in the stomach.

ChiChi has her hand up in the air, waiving over the informal security who’d seen the exchange.

They haul the guy away, and Bruce is still a little keyed up, wondering what just happened when Adoya throws her arms around him, pressing soft lips to his.

The kiss is warm and friendly, and he squeezes her waist for just a moment before stepping away, heat rising in his cheeks.

“My hero,” she says, and then laughs, low and bright, a little bitter and says something to ChiChi in Yoruba that he assumes is about the vileness of men. Then turns to Bruce. “That was my ex. He didn’t mean anything. He’s just, like all of us, looking for some comfort in the familiar.”

Bruce drinks his water, and when the song changes, he decides to keep dancing. His pride is such a small thing to sacrifice.

***

There’s an observation deck off the throne room. Natasha has been given leave to use it. Each formal and informal area of the palace requires special dispensation. It’s wearying, even if she understands the necessity.

The night stretches out over the waterfalls in front of her and Okoye, who is leaning on the retaining wall, gestures towards a beer.

“This morning,” Natasha starts.

“Accidents happen, particularly with green girls eager to show the Westerner up.”

“That isn’t what happened.”

“I know,” Okoye says, “but it’s the explanation they have accepted.”

She’s not exactly sure what happened. One minute she was demonstrating a block, the next she was goading the girl into a maneuver beyond her capability. What caused the shift is a mystery to Natasha, it happened in the space of a few heartbeats, a loss of control she didn’t think herself capable of. That the hurt had been a minor scratch is amazing.

“We train so that we can move forward, be prepared to defend our country and our Queen, the resources our country is blessed with. Not to become fighters, but guards. You are not a guard.”

She takes that in. “I have become one.”

“I need these girls to become women, to learn how to protect and defend. You’re a good model in some ways, fierce and unforgiving and bold. Focused to the point of blindness. You know how to work with a team, but you aren’t a soldier, and my job is to create soldiers.”

Shame steals across Natasha’s face. It’s said with such kindness.

She thinks Okoye will continue to push the issue but she doesn’t.

“I miss my husband,” she says instead, like it’s a breezy and casual fact. She is not someone who does casual or breezy.

Natasha knows that Okoye had been separated from her husband prior to the snap, and that his survival has been something of a mixed blessing.

“We are all missing people.” It’s trite, but true. She’s usually better at this.

Okoye ignores her. “He made some poor choices. He lost my respect, and I thought, my love. And yet, I have missed him. I have...visited him to see what reconciliation might feel like.”

Natasha waits. It’s unlike Okoye to muse about romantic matters when there isn’t a veil of night and fermented fruit between them. Oh wait, that’s exactly what this is.

“The sex was satisfying. But his vision remains narrow, his scope short-sighted. He wants to go out, fight demons and monsters. Restore the world before.”

Her belly tightens. “Isn’t that what we all want?”

Okoye shrugs.

“We must move forward. My country must move forward. My husband? He has the luxury of wanting revenge, wanting a second chance. Although I don’t believe that he truly understands the choice he made, the harm he did.”

“Will you take him back?”

Okoye shakes her head. “For good? No. But for now? Perhaps. I grow weary of sharing my bed with grief alone.”

Natasha sits with that, hollow. “There are other options.”

“Yes, but I want the familiarity of him. I’m no more immune than he is to the comfort of old memories. I want to heal. I want our country to heal. Then, perhaps, I will think about new hands on my skin.”

Natasha briefly considers hands of any kind on her body, caressing, drawing pleasure. It feels like nothing. She tries instead, to imagine calloused fingers and blunt nails threading through her hair, clasping her hand and the gut ache from earlier deepens.

“Will you forgive your absent doctor?” Okoye asks, and it surprises Nat although it shouldn’t. “Mend your quarrel”?

“It wasn’t a quarrel,” she says, although what was it? Natasha outlining the absurdity of him leaving with the delegation, Bruce’s face twisted in pained helplessness as he simply repeated, “I have to go.”

“Hmmm.”

“He thought he could do more out in the field.”

“You felt differently? Do you still?”

They have discussed this.

Natasha tightens her lips. She won’t cross her arms, put herself in a defensive posture in front of Okoye. The other woman is too sharp, and Natasha has been practicing honesty with strangers.

“He was running away under the guise of doing good work.”

That sounds cruel. Bruce had been part of the medical delegation that Queen Ramonda set up to aid various rural and urban centers in south and central Africa. She can’t even resent that he’s been out there instead of here, training and researching, working on gathering intel and trying to figure out a solution.

Well, she can. In fact, she does.

“People leave,” Okoye says, “And it often feels like they’re leaving us.”

“We’re a team,” Natasha says finally, biting out a truth that feels like tin against metal fillings. “He’s part of the team. He could have stayed, helped out here. With us.”

It sounds so petty when she says it, and yet it feels as true as it had the day he left.

“He had a different calling.”

And she had done nothing to show him that he was still welcome, had nothing left to ask him to stay.

“I should sleep,” Natasha says.

“We will spar in the morning?” Okoye calls, amused at her deflection.

Natasha doesn’t bother to answer.

She has trouble closing her eyes, Nombeko breathing steadily in the next bed, thinking of rage and forgiveness and how impossible the idea of moving forward really feels.

Of Bruce in a foreign place somewhere, in a cot or a tent, under the stars, or wrapped in clean sheets. She starts to think of Clint, and rolls to the side, shutting her eyes, forcing sleep to come.

***

Bruce sits up in bed, achey and displaced, mouth dry, tongue coated as sunlight streams in and his alarm trills.

He’d dreamt of battles, although not his own.

It’s an old dream by now, but in it he fights a wolf, a witch, a world.

He hadn’t dreamt of being left behind, helplessly trapped in a metal suit as everyone he loves dissolves around him, Natasha’s face twisting in aggrieved shock as she turns to dust.

Nor of stroking her skin, her mouth hot on his collarbone, or worse yet, her hand in his, head on his shoulders. Dreams of tenderness he no longer has a right to.

So, all in all, a better night than perhaps he deserves, given his indulgences.

The alcohol at the after hours parties varies from homemade hooch to high end, but it all leaves Bruce creaky and dehydrated, exacerbated by dancing and sweating in a sea of bodies. By a rough, grateful kiss that he’d sunk into and then laughingly pulled away from.

He cracks open the water bottle he’d put on the nightstand before falling asleep and winces as his jaw catches at the hinge. He prods along the boundaries of his face, checking for anything unusual, confirming his general features along with some localized tenderness and a persistent ache. He does that some mornings just for fun, mapping his nose and jaw and eyebrows for scope. Well, for reassurance, but let’s call it fun.

This morning, it’s not quite enough. At first he blames the booze, the dreams which leave him disoriented as he re-acclimates to a smaller body, relearns the shape of his hands and thighs, his feet and his cock. He forgoes making toast and decides to shave. Sliding the razor over cheeks and chin should be confirmation that he’s Puny Banner and he can just get on with it. The mirror has never been a friend, but at least it’s an ally.

Bruce digs out his shaving equipment, swirls the brush around in the soap, leaning into the grooming ritual before taking a hard look at himself.

Despite the previously identified tenderness, the bruise is still a surprise, peeking up around the edge of his beard, curving up under his eye. Bruce pokes at it, careful at first then with increasing pressure until the ache of it steals his breath and he has to stop.

HIs fingers itch to return though, to probe, like looking for a missing tooth. He decides to forgo shaving. The beard will offer some protective camouflage, but he should clean and trim it, look less like a hobo. He concentrates, trying to try and stay on task instead of getting lost in pointless meanderings as he trims around his mouth, using the electric razor to shape the hair along his jaw without irritating the swollen skin. Fortunately, his tooth isn’t loose.

He’s already late. But it’s so hard not to revel, just a bit. In the hangover, the bruise, the aborted kiss, the “fuck you” to more than a decade of caution. These are all things that used to happen to other people.

Bruce buttons his shirt, careful against the painful slide of ribs, slips on the bracelet with the Wakandan bead, finds his glasses.

The other physicians, who often revel far more enthusiastically than Bruce, are always on time. He doesn’t want to stand out in that way.

He takes the thermal coffee cup with him. The caffeine hit feels almost as decadent as the palm wine and local rum and whiskey. He’s missed coffee on a desperate level. The taste is a memory he trusts, one of the few, although he used to like it with milk. Now, even the smell of cows milk and cheese turns his stomach. Maybe Hulk is lactose intolerant.

He’d tested it one night before he left Wakanda, eating bowls and bowls of ice cream in the kitchen with Rhodes until he doubled over, stomach cramping, sweat beading at his temples, waiting for something to happen. Nothing amiss but a long night in his ensuite bathroom had occurred.

The walk to the hospital is quieter than one might expect from a city the size of Johannesburg, even now. After. But it’s not unusual, or at least among Bruce’s small sample size. Scooters and motorbikes are a better option than cars with the road debris remaining, but a bicycle is better, more nimble, easier to maneuver, no petrol required. But most, like Bruce, who have somewhere regular to be, just allow more time and walk.

Bruce uses the time as a form of call and response -- gauging the reality of what he sees and reacting to it. That car turned over in the road has been there since he’d arrived in Johannesburg? Now a group of squawking gulls perch on the wheel and in front of the open door. Are they real? Are they a sign? A threat? He isn’t quite sure.

Part of him wants to go over to the car, drive them away. But he’s not sure if that’s a human response to the noise, to fact that an assemblage of birds probably means something foul, and not fowl, in the vehicle.

Or is it a remnant of Hulk, driven by the joy of scattering flying things into the wind? For a moment, he considers what it would feel like to pick one up, hold it between his hands, the heat of life, the thrum of heartbeat, to bite into the head…

Nope. Nope. Nope. Okay, thank fuck. His stomach turns, acid and bile rising, but the relief is intense. Although that thought experiment is flawed, he thinks. Orcs maybe, or ogres eat birds. Not physicists nor Hulks.

Whatever.

Bruce leaves the birds alone, keeps walking, clenches his fist, sips his coffee and tries not to choke on it as it turns ashy in his mouth. Fuck this, he thinks. You can’t have coffee. I took it back. It’s mine now.

***

In another life, she’d been a dancer. The sparring serves her well, not simply strength and discipline but the predictable patterns of choreographed movement.

This fight has become a pas de deux over the weeks, a give and take in harmony. Okoye’s staff swings overhead, slicing down in a parry that requires Natasha to bend unnaturally, to flip and roll and lash out with her batons.

They fight whenever they can, well matched. Okoye has little room to pause and grieve, her duties defined and persistent. They both, Natasha thinks, take something away from these matches. She only wishes it were clarity.

The only clarity Natasha has found can be summed up as: Find Thanos. Kill Thanos. Restore the world. Barring that, make him suffer first. Her debts are bigger than she can conceive of now.

The door opens to the private training room. Okoye swings her staff again, but holds back, giving Natasha leave to check her response. She doesn’t, counters with a kick aggressive enough to interrupt the dance. Okoye is forced to whirl, plant her feet, hit Natasha hard in the belly to drive her back.

The pain reverberates deep into her solar plexus, down her spine. Twice in two days. Fuck.

“Romanoff.” Steve barks out her name, fear and concern. She holds up a hand. She doesn’t need his concern. She’s fine.

Catching her breath, she straightens in time to see Okoye and Steve exchange a look.

“Captain,” she says,”I will give the two of you some privacy.”

Natasha drinks some water as Steve makes his way into the practice ring. There aren’t ropes but the Wakandans are very specific about differentiating on and off the mat. Combat is contained within.

Steve knows this. He’d spent more time here than she had, before.

Stepping past the boundary is a deliberate action, one he tries to counteract as she tenses.

“Not everything is a fight,” he says softly, palms up, conciliatory.

“From you?” She says, eyebrow inching up.

He folds his arms across his chest. He looks so tired, pale, bruising circles under his eyes.

“Memorial?” she asks.

“This morning. You should go.”

“We can’t all keep saying kaddish over the dead, Steve. You’re killing yourself with this.” It’s harsh, but she doesn’t know how to get through to him otherwise. Remind him that there are those lost, but that somehow, some way, they might be able to change things, reverse it. Do some good, if they can just focus.

He looks like he’s going to argue, but instead he shifts his weight, gives her a stern look and says, “We heard from Stark. He’s alive. He’s coming home.”

Blood rushes in her ears, but it fades quickly. Had she really believed that Stark was dead? Her knees feel wobbly, but she keeps upright, focuses instead on the essentials. Stark is alive. Stark has always been a catalyst. He can help them, can help her end this feeling of stagnant, cloying dread. Help Steve stop mourning and start acting. Help them DO something.

As if he’d heard her thoughts, he says, “We have to go back. Be there for when he arrives.”

Yes. Finally.

“When?”

“Tomorrow. The Queen has also asked us to leave. She says our presence has become distracting to their efforts to rebuild. There’s...they don’t need us here anymore.”

That too, is a relief. A direct order from their benefactor to get the fuck out. One he can’t ignore. Which means she, too, can leave without abandoning him.

“They want to move on. And so should we.”

Now that the possibility is in front of her, she can barely stand to wait another minute, tries to keep her sight on the next steps. One foot in front of the other, the way she’s gotten through everyday since Thanos destroyed the world.

“The warrants?”

“Rhodes has been working with the remains of the State Department. They’re helping us clear a flight path. It’s part of why we need one more day.”

“I’m ready,” she says. “Is Bruce meeting us here or there?”

Steve looks at the floor. “I’m not sure.”

“Here’s easier, but I’m sure they’ll help him get out of Tanzania and fly to New York. I think Queen Ramonda has a soft spot for the big guy.”

“No, I mean, I’m just not sure if he’s coming. When, I mean.”

That stops her.

“It should be all of us, Steve.”

He unfolds his arms, then, and reaches out to her. She steps neatly away. “Rhodes is leaving this afternoon, he’s already been cleared individually. He wanted to talk to Pepper in person. Bruce can catch up later. Let him be. Unless...” There’s that stupid wistfulness twisting his mouth like he’d encourage her if it means fucking hearts and flowers and pining.

She shakes her head, ruthless, ignoring the catch in her throat as his eyes narrow in disappointment. “This is about team, Steve. It needs to be all of us.”

“But it’s not,” he says, and the compassion there rips into her heart. He shouldn’t be able to do this to her. Not wear-his-expressions on his face like some sort of goddamned toddler Steve Rogers. She’s not that easy to ready.

“Clint,” he says and she wants to shove him to the ground.

“He’ll come back,” she says. “When we’re all in New York, he’ll come back. He’ll have to.”

“Nat…”

“I’ll go get Bruce. We’ll meet you there.”

“We need to go now, Nat. I’m taking the jet with Thor and Rocket. I want you to come with us.”

“Give me a day.”

He does put his hand on her shoulder then and she struggles not to shrug it off. She will not level more hurt at Steve, but she can barely stand the weight of his grip.

“We failed because we weren’t a team, Steve. Bruce is part of the team. If Bruce is there, Clint will be there. But he won’t be there if you let Bruce continue to dick around in east Africa.”

“Nat, no one wants to leave Bruce behind. But we need the day to prep the jet. I can’t spare it. But go, maybe if you talk to him...”

“I’m not mending fences, Steve, I’m bringing him home. I’m doing my job.”

“Nat,” he says, voice rough with something that she thinks might be tears and she cannot handle watching Steve cry, certainly not over her, over the endless mourning that they can’t escape. He pulls her to him, and she tries so hard not to push away that when she puts her hands up on his chest, he takes it as an embrace. She wants to scream, but she lets him hold her close.

***

“You need to be delicate with the interface,” Bruce explains to the five new doctors who are rotating onto the staff for this week’s shift. “It’s not so much breakable as sensitive, and too much pressure will skew your results. You want to see broken bones not cellular degeneration.”

He glides his finger over the bead so that it scans and records the chest cavity on the training dummy, and then shows them how to manipulate the resulting imagery, shifting out bone and tissue to find the bullet wound.

It’s as much science fiction as science in someway, a glorious piece of technology. As a diagnostic tool, it allows the volunteer staff of physicians and health professionals to identify trauma more quickly and then turn the cases over to surgeons and other healers.

The burn-out rate is high, though. Grief and loss, rage and chaos all weigh heavily. People want to do good, do their duty for those who are left, but there’s just so much to do and Shuri’s brilliant technology can’t fix broken hearts.

He turns the beads over to the group to practice, walking them through the exercises. He’s a better teacher than he’d been before. More patience with questions and quirks, quicker to laugh instead of find fault.

The headache is receding, and none of the new folks have mentioned his shiner. The anonymity is so freeing. Here, he’s just some guy. A teacher. A doctor. Glasses and a lab coat and corny dad jokes laced with a little sardonic banter. And if his clothes seem to fit better than the skin they cover, which feels worn and stretched, so be it.

Bruce would be rueful over his failed ambitions if this scenario weren’t as close to hope as anything he could have asked for a decade ago.

Hope, minus a few billion people, of course. (Or love, but if there’s anything Bruce understands, it’s compromise).

***

The Dora’s formations are precise, despite the holes in their ranks. The General is compassionate but firm: There will be no breaks in discipline, no scattershot training, no lax behavior.

Natasha waits until the forms are completed and the women break into pairs and triads to spar before approaching Okoye.

“How’s your belly?” She asks as Nat signals that she’d like a word.

“Bruised,” she says. “Deservedly so.”

“You are leaving soon.”

Natasha nods. “I just need to recover part of our flock.”

Okoye raises an eyebrow. “Doctor Banner, after all.”

Natasha gives a short nod of her chin. She looks out over the young women training in the field, at the older women, too, who have come out of retirement to fill out the ranks.

“I need transportation,” Natasha says.

“Ah,” Okoye says. “Your mission is your own.”

Nat waits.

“Give me an hour,” she says, “In the throne room.”

The Queen purses her mouth at Natasha’s formal request. Steve rests with his arms crossed behind her. It’s hard to tell if he’s here as support or discouragement.

“We’ve provided quite a few resources to the outside world, to your companions in fact,” Queen Ramonda says. “Why should we do this? Take you to Johannesburg so you can interrupt the work of the physicians there.”

Johannesburg? She thought he’d been in Tanzania. It burns in her throat, that she hadn’t known.

“I didn’t realize the delegation had moved on.”

Ramonda is a master of the raised eyebrow. “The city was in need, and Doctor Banner was eager to aid them.”

Johannesburg. Of course. And now she wants to tear him away from that effort. Except, the truth is, Bruce is doing penance as much as Steve, and she needs him out of his head and focused on the fight. It really will take the personal touch.

“Stark has survived,” she says to the Queen. “He’s returning to earth. Perhaps he will have answers. Or will know something we don’t. It’s important. He and Bruce, Doctor Banner, they make good collaborators. They may be able to help...find a solution to what happened.”

Okoye exchanges a look with the Queen, and then looks at Natasha.

“That’s your perspective, certainly, but again, why should we allow you to pull him away from the work he has chosen to do? That we have asked of him?”

She wants to scream at them, say, “Don’t you want your world back? Your king, your scientists, your sisters, your warriors? Your country?”

Instead, she says, “I believe that you offered him the work because he’d been trained by the Princess, you wanted him to train others. But by now, surely…”

Okoye snorts and the Queen glares at her.

“I don’t need to be manipulated, girl.”

Good, since she barely has the resources to remain patient and polite as it is. All she can do is brazen it out, wonder where even her capacity to pretend at embarrassed gratitude has gone as she asks for a personal favor.

“Airspace is still in question,” she says plainly. “Captain Rogers is preparing our own ship, and I don’t want to be delayed plotting a trajectory with a prop plane, or take a commercial airliner. I know it’s a lot to ask. But I’m asking.”

The Queen agrees with a gesture that signals anything to finally be rid of them.

As she leaves, she hears Okoye say to Steve, “She is your lieutenant. You owe her more than this.”

“Nat’s her own person,” he says, “She handles things her own way.”

Packing is quick. She hasn’t collected anything during her stay.

She briefly considers leaving a note for Nombeko thanking her for her tolerance.

Natasha hasn’t provided much companionship during her residency and finds that that she simply has nothing to say. She leaves the bed made and the lights off.

Jim is in the hangar when she arrives, his own duffle in hand. Several of the Wakandans are there to see him off and say goodbye.

There’s no one here for her.

He moves away from them to speak with her, reaching out to squeeze her hand, letting go quickly. “You sure about this?” he says.

“It’s a conversation. Personal persuasion. I’m kind of an expert.”

The look he gives her suggests otherwise. “You’re wound pretty tight these days, Nat.”

“Who isn’t?”

He makes a hmmming sound, reminiscent of Okoye’s from last night. “I guess give my regards to Banner, and we’ll see you in New York.”

He turns to go, and she calls after him, throat tight. “Jim!” He looks over his shoulder, waiting. She’s not sure why she says it. “I’m glad Stark is alive.”

He grins at her. “Me, too.”

The Wakandan jet makes remarkable time. The technology is astounding. Stark would be losing his mind. She wonders, just for a moment, if Bruce had felt the same. The thought tightens her throat and she shoves it back down.

“Five hours.” The pilot lands on the roof of the Wakandan embassy in Johannesburg as Okoye taps on the small bead in her hand.

Natasha nods her thanks.

“If you need a place to wait, to…” Okoye tilts her wrist towards Natasha’s. She feels a slight tingle as the two interfaces connect. “There’s a suite across the way at the Intercontinental.”

“I won’t need it.”

“You might.”

She allows Okoye to transmit the suite’s number and access code, then makes her way to the hospital.

~*~

The sterile muted halls of the Netcare facility press around her with a familiar cloying claustrophobia. Hospitals all over the world are housed in different buildings, but their soundtracks are the same--efficiency and agony and recovery. Bodies on battlefields, markers of dusty graves have been her companions over the past few months. She should be immune to this. She’s not.

Natasha rounds the corner to the nurses’ station, and stops short. She twigs to his voice before she even sees him and suddenly this seems like a terrible idea. He’s deep in conversation, glasses dangling between his teeth as he gestures at a point on his tablet, confirming something for an older lab-coated man with a shock of white hair, startling against the rich black of his skin.

Bruce looks better than he has a right to. His hair has grown out a little, a beard shading his jaw, but while he’s more gray than she remembers, he’s neatly groomed, back straight, stance confident, skin warmly tanned.

It doesn’t track at first, him healthy and at ease when her memory of him is of sunken eyes and skin grey with exhaustion. He looks like he’s thriving and she knows that she...does not.

The last time she’d seen that kind of ease on his face, he’d been loose and lax in her bed, half asleep.

She fights the urge to turn away, shoves down the memory which had surfaced unbidden. He doesn’t know she’s there. She could still leave. Should leave. Dredge up the indifference she’d shown him in Wakanda and go back to the embassy.

Or buy her own damned plane ticket and fly...anywhere but here.

***

Bruce worries that he’s teaching himself out a job. It had been different in some of the rural areas where the extra hands made all the difference, but here, with doctors and volunteers cycling through regularly, he’s more translator than teacher. And certainly more teacher than physician, as becomes obvious as he walks Dr. Khumalo through the diagnostic tool on the tablet.

He’s just not ready to go yet. He’s still grateful to Queen Ramonda for asking if he’d remain with the team and accompany them to Johannesburg.

“You’ve had the most experience out of all of them,” she said, “In training others, in field medicine. They know the equipment, but you had to learn it yourself, I think, can anticipate the challenges.”

Bruce was far past the point where the mildly condescending kindness of a tolerant monarch could bruise his ego. She was right about the learning curve. He knows what rewriting your expectations of possibility looks like in real time.

Dr. Khumalo taps the screen and Bruce palms the back of his neck because he’s not quite sure how they got to that particular interface. He smiles sheepishly at the other doctor, but Khumalo’s attention is elsewhere.

He nudges Bruce, and says, “There’s a pretty girl staring at you.”

***

She stays rooted to her spot until the older doctor gestures at Bruce and he looks up. The smile breaking out over his face doesn’t break her studied calm. She’s better than that.

It’s just she can’t remember seeing joy on his face like that before -- so open and honest and completely unguarded. At home. He looks like he’s at home. Her throat closes in spite of herself, tears she’s kept at bay for the past months unexpectedly threatening, stinging her eyes.

She stays where she is and confusion deepens the lines between his eyes. He gently touches the other man on the arm who makes a “go-go” gesture, shooing Bruce towards her.

He folds his glasses, tucking the tablet into his lab coat as he approaches.

“Nat,” he says, “I’m so glad to see you.”

He’s awkward, reaching for her like he’s going to pull her into a hug, which is so unexpected that she nearly lets him before stepping away neatly. Bruce doesn’t instigate touch. Close up, she can see a bruise ringing his occipital bone, another one stealing up from his jawline.

“Sorry,” he says, “I know, I just...it’s still a little hard to reign big stuff in.”

She pulls her head back, uncertain and he drops his hands, wiggling them a little. “No hugging. Clearly, you’re not here to be hugged. But, let me show you around. Introduce you.”

Her chest is heavy, throat clogged at his pride in her presence, at wanting to show her the work he’s been doing.

“Bruce,” she says, “Stark’s back. We’re going home.”

***

The tears hit first, leaking hot and salty from his eyes and he swipes at his face, only a little embarrassed. Emotional control in extreme circumstances has been another victim of the Hulk years unless he’s trying very hard. They sting against the scraped skin of his occipital bone. “That’s such good news, Nat. Really. I can’t even…Sorry, I was starting to think he really was dead.”

She nods like he’s a little kid, curious and a little off-put by his outpouring. “And now that he’s returning, we’re going back. Steve and I, Rhodes, we’ve been given clearance to return. Which means you too, by default.”

Oh, Christ. No, she can’t mean that.

She takes a deep breath, and continues brightly, “So, while I’d love to see what you’ve been up to, we’ve gotta go.”

He shakes his head, and she says, “I’m your ride. I’d have sent Steve, but he’s a terrible driver.”

Shit, shit, shit. Of course that’s why she’s here. Offering him up yet another chance to disappoint her.

“Nat,” he says as gently as he can. “I’m not going.”

It’s just a flicker, the sliver of hurt that flashes across her face before she schools her perfect features and just says, “Bullshit.”

***

He barks out a shocked laugh when she challenges him. “Really,” he says, “I’m not going anywhere.”

 

Her first instinct is anger, but that’s easily dismissed. She can work past anger. But her gut twists when he keeps looking at her, earnest and sincere, like this is just okay. Like it’s something she has to just accept.

“This is stupid Bruce,” she says, “Just get your stuff.”

“Nat,” he says gently. “I’m really not sure why you came in person. I told Steve I wasn’t coming back if this happened. Not now.”

The gut punch feeling is back.

“Steve?” she says. “What the hell do you mean you told Steve?” That can’t be right. Bruce hasn’t talked to Steve. He would have told her. Right?

“C’mon,” Bruce says, and gestures towards a set of double doors. “Can we go somewhere maybe? Talk?”

She wants to say no, demand that he tell her what the hell is going on, but he bites his lip and she’s not sure she can resist Bruce actually wanting to talk out an issue instead of running from it.

So much has changed, and she feels so lost in it. “Fine.”

“Are you up for a walk? The Botanical Gardens are close, and maybe it’s…” he trails off at her look and finishes lamely, “Let me just tell them I’m taking a break.”

She shrugs, but follows him.

“I can’t believe Steve didn’t talk to you about this,” Bruce says, as he scans his badge.

“Yeah, well.” Worst case, Steve just got distracted, didn’t want to have the conversation. Best case, or maybe actual worst case, Steve’s playing yenta.

She follows Bruce to a little pocket of nursing charge stations, where he waves to a pretty young Wakandan doctor whose long braids are tied in an intricate knot on her head. Dr. Amadi is stitched onto her white coat.

She gives Bruce a wide smile, “You didn’t ice that well enough.” She points her pen at his eye.

“Battle scars,” he quips, mouth curving up with such sincere affection that a stab of honest, ugly jealous pierces at her.

“Ice,” Dr. Amadi orders, laughing. “Get some from the lounge. You should know better, Doctor.” She proffers a styrofoam cup from the counter and hands it to him. “Here. It’s not too late to ease the bruise.”

Natasha raises an eyebrow, but Bruce takes the cup with a shake of his head and ducks into the little kitchenette around the corner, leaving her alone with the tall physician.

It suits him, this warm flirtation. It’s what his life should have been, maybe— the graceful, teasing affection of colleagues, the winking appreciative glances. His own deflections and devotions. Natasha knows that it never was like this, not even before the Hulk, but dammit, it should have been.

She considers, again, walking away and leaving him to it. Finds that she simply can’t.

“Things got a bit out of hand last night,” Dr. Amadi says, carefully. There’s no sense of telling tales, though. “Bruce stepped in to break up an altercation.”

“He got in the middle of a fight?” It doesn’t sound like him. Or rather, it doesn’t sound like the man she knew, putting himself in harm’s way with all the inherent risks of making a small harm a national disaster.

And isn’t that at the heart of this? That everything has changed and she can’t even trust the ground beneath her. Wasn’t that the heart of the fight before he left?

“Too much alcohol, late nights and high stress,” Dr. Amadi continues. “And grief.” Her features cloud, and she looks at her hands. Grief shrouds everything right now. There is no escape from it, no matter the coping mechanisms.

“We were dancing, we were just…things got out of hand,” she repeats. “And Doctor Banner was very kind, even after he was hit.” She shrugs, then looks uncomfortable. “Okoye is a cousin of my cousin,” she says. “ I know who you are. Who he is.”

Bruce returns with the cup of ice held to his face, wincing a little. It looks ridiculous.

“Thank you,” he says to Amadi. “I’ll be back in an hour. Maybe a little more.”

Her dark eyes sparkle despite what Natasha can now tell are circles of exhaustion underneath.

“You didn’t have to stay for this shift,” she says. “It was a kindness, but we can spare you.” She gestures at Natasha. “Spend time with your friend.”

Bruce shrugs helplessly, shoulders drawing up a little. He’s clearly still terrible with deceptions and the word friend hardly covers it.

The doctor turns over her hand where her bead projects a small screen. She taps twice on a projection, then makes a sliding gesture that Natasha recognizes as the send command. “But if you could finalize and approve the supply request to be sent to the Queen,” she says, “I’d appreciate it.”

Bruce smiles at her. “Of course.”

They remain quiet, walking together, coming out into the bright daylight and then she just can’t hold it in anymore.

“You were in a fight,” Natasha says, and hates the accusatory tone that she can’t quite swallow.

He winces again. “It wasn’t like that...I wouldn’t…”

He picks the ice out of the cup, presses it to his cheekbone.

“I got in the middle of something. I should have left well enough alone…”

“Why didn’t you?”

He rubs the melting ice between his fingers. “Because, for once, I didn’t have to.”

Oh.

They stop at an intersection, and he says, “It’s this way.”

The Gardens are familiar. She has been here before, years back. It was summer. She’d pretended to be a Dutch businessman’s plaything for months before stealing his secrets and poisoning his beer. He’d died badly. And she’d been paid very well.

She’d sat in these gardens, watching the day bloom, deciding whether or not she to take the job in Prague that had been dangled in front of her.

That job led to Barton, eventually. All of which led her here.

“Oh,” Bruce says as they walk along the path, “Ice cream.”

He veers off the sidewalk into the grass and she struggles not to scream at him as she follows along. Who would be selling ice cream at the end of the world? Who’s eating it? Apparently, Bruce.

“Hungry?”

“Not really.”

He approaches the cart anyway, pointing between the two of them and handing over a bill, waving off change. His posture is loose, and he stretches his face up to the sun while the vendor scoops ice cream from the rolling freezer case in front of him.

Bruce hands her a sugar cone topped with pale sorbet. “Yuzu,” he says.

It’s what she would have chosen for herself if she’d been inclined. She wants to knock the treat into the grass, watch as he shrugs and schools his features against the rejection.

She takes it instead. Bruce squints at her for approval, and so she sighs, takes a tentative lick. Satisfied, he turns back to his own paper cup.

His ice cream is bright purple and his brow furrows as he eats it with a tiny wooden spoon. “Does this taste funny to you?”

He holds the spoon towards her and she pushes it away. “It’s beetroot,” she says. “What did you think it would taste like?”

He pulls the spoon back, flips it over and pulls it along his tongue, then shrugs. “Things taste funny,” he says, as if that weren’t a whole can of worms. “Mostly everything. Except coffee. Sometimes.”

“Everything?” she asks.

“Sort of.” He holds his cup to her to take, which she does out of habit.

“May I?” he asks, them gently wraps his fingers around her wrist, pulling the cone towards himself. His fingers are chilly, and she’s transfixed as his tongue darts out, catches the drip sliding towards her wrist, flicking against the scoop.

He retreats, thumb swiping his mouth and heat floods her unexpectedly as he keeps hold of her hand. He rubs his thumb along the pulse in her wrist, waiting for her and eventually, his tentative smile fades.

“Hmmm,” he says, “Too sweet?”

“Maybe,” she slips her wrist free, handing him back the paper cup and dumping the cone into a nearby trash can while he finds a bench.

She returns to sit beside him as he spoons purple ice cream into his mouth.

They stay that way, the world spinning around them, sunny and clear and empty and suddenly she can’t stand it anymore -- waiting for his explanation, waiting for him. She’s been waiting three goddamn years for something, and now he wants her patience, he wants to feed her treats, a child being taken out of school to receive bad news.

All the news right now is bad. How’s this going to be any different, and how dare he…?

She’s furious, can feel hot tears of rage behind her eyelids. She won’t let him see it. Can’t. Swallows it down until it burns. When she speaks, she sounds calm, if cold.

“Steve didn’t tell me you’d spoken. I didn’t think...you’ve been gone and no one’s been in contact.”

Bruce gives her a puzzled glance, purple ice cream abandoned. “Rhodes went with me to Dar es Salaam and then into Zanzibar. Thor comes out once a week for breakfast.”

She frowns. She hadn’t known this.

“Steve was here last week,” he says. “We had dinner. He crashed on the sofa, which was hilarious since it’s half his size, but he said it was better than the goat hut. But you know how he is. He and I talked about this. At length. The possibility of return.”

How had she not known? Is she really the one who’s been so absent? Why hadn’t anyone told her? What else doesn’t she know? Her hands are so cold, cheeks hot and the world is narrowing dangerously around her.

“Nat,” he says, “Hey, don’t…it’s okay.”

Except it’s really not.

“Who else?” she chokes out, as if that’s what’s important. “Pepper? Clint?” And her voice cracks.

He puts the tiny cup on the bench next to him and takes her hand. His fingers band hers. She wants to fight free, but he’s so warm.

How has she forgotten how warm he is? How their palms fit together?

“Not, Clint,” he says. “No.”

***

He’s never seen her like this, not even right after, when she’d been choking on her pain, gasping as the rest of them stared in stunned silence. Not after finally hearing from Clint, when grief had stripped her so raw she’d disappeared.

This isn’t her mask of cool, impersonal distance. There’s nothing impersonal about the way her mouth crumples, the absolute rage that twists her beauty into something terrifying. Her fingers are cold, even in the heat of the day, like she’s going into shock even as her cheeks flush. He rubs her hands between his palms even as her forearms tense, ready to jerk out of his grasp.

“But Pepper,” she bites out.

“Yeah,” he says. “She’s alone. She called, heard from Jim that I was here.”

She does pull away then, shoving her hands under her armpits and it shouldn’t shock him, the defensive posture, the way she’s trying to pull into herself. God knows they’re all still trying to figure out how to cope, but this isn’t Natasha.

There isn’t anyone to see, no one to hide from, but the woman he knows...no, he corrects himself, the woman he _remembers_ would never reveal so much of herself on a park bench in public.

He aches for her. They’ve all lost so much—friends and family and faith in a happy ending, or at the very least redemption. But the rest of them are adjusting, working towards something. Nat just seems frozen.

Steve had talked about this, how she just doesn’t seem to hear him. How worried he was, but the discussion had been vague as they both side-stepped the obvious -- that Bruce was mourning someone he’d last seen months ago, and for Nat, their closeness was a distant memory, one she’d exhibited little obvious interest in revisiting.

That the only advice Bruce could offer would apply to someone who really didn’t exist any more. And yet as she sits in front of him, shocky and frozen, he thinks it was all bullshit. Natasha hadn’t changed, just grown, adapted, exhibited her ruthless pragmatism and continued to strive to do the good she could in the world. Until the world had finally pushed back too hard.

He wants to wrap his arms around her, push past her barriers, but neither version of himself— old or new— thinks that’s a good idea.

Everything about her body language says hands-off: the stiff posture, the bitten lips, the tension, but he’s never seen her in pain like this, not after the Hulk’s attack on the Helicarrier, not even after the Maximoff girl got in her head. He’d seen her shaky then, a little catatonic and withdrawn, but clinging to her composure with everything she had.

This is pain, and he has never been able to bear seeing her in pain, seeing a women he loved caved in to herself in grief and fear.

He’s not the man she trusted with her pain once upon a time. She’s not the woman who opened herself to him. But his memories of loving her, the sense memory of it, is closer to his surface and he thinks if the fucked up reality of their relationship is good for anything, it’s to offer her comfort if he can.

He holds up his hands, telegraphing his intent with every millimeter of movement until he can brush a hand against her shoulder, cup the bones there.

“Let me call Steve,” he says, quiet and gentle, when she doesn’t pull away. “Or Clint.”

She turns on him then, eyes blazing, so full of self-loathing he can’t even touch the pain there.

“He’s gone. He won’t answer my calls, any of my messages, and I tried to track him, but there’s just no… he doesn’t want to be found. He’s gone and you’re gone and Steve is just… there’s no Steve left, just Captain America on a fucking mission and I couldn’t leave him to go find someone who didn’t want to be found anyway and...”

Bruce bites his lip. “And we all left you alone,” he says softly.

This loose fitting skin comes with equally loose lips, but he’s having a hard time holding back these days. It seems so pointless.

“You left a long time ago,” she snaps. “The rest are just...catching up.”

“Oh, Tasha,” he says, fingers gentle on the wing of her shoulder. “I’m so sorry.”

“Then come back, make it up.”

He shakes his head, and she looks at him, flint in her gaze. “Then what does that apology mean, if you won’t come with us? It has to be us, all of us and you’re just gonna stay here? Stay so goddamned selfish fighting and fucking and…”

It’s a monumentally unfair assessment of his choice, her voice so glassy that he feels cut by it, but ultimately it’s fear and failure he hears.

“And what,” he says softly, not denying it because he knows it’s not the point. “Are you all going to do that’s better than fighting and fucking and rebuilding?”

She shrugs him off, looking at her hands.

“We’re going to try and fix it.” Her voice trembles, rage again, not sorrow.

“And then what?”

It stops her. He folds his hands together, looks at the laced fingers, his and yet still foreign somehow, steeped in blood for the past months, his metaphors made literal, his reality inside out. A healing crisis. Somehow, if he can’t give her solace, he needs to give her something. Maybe honesty is the place to start.

“You’re not the only one who lost something,” he says softly. “You’re not the only one who failed.”

***

It feels like a damn bursting inside her, months of choking bottled grief and fear — for Steve, for Clint, for those lost. She’s been holding everything in check, trying to keep moving forward, but she’s failed to do more than check her peripherals and she’s missed so damned much.

Like Bruce, who continues, “I can’t go with you, Nat. There’s no point. He, Hulk’s not coming to the party, and if Tony’s coming back, you don’t need me. I’m not the guy to look to the future and see the fight. But I can look at the now, and offer up what I can. What you want from me? I can’t give you. Not anymore.”

She wants to ask him what, exactly, he thinks she wants, but that’s disingenuous, a big green elephant in the room. So she tells him the truth.

“If you come back, I think Clint will too.”

It’s not the whole of the truth, but it’s part of it. The ugly desperate part that has watched all these people she love run from her.

Bruce starts to laugh, wild and a little unhinged. “Christ, Nat. You really aren’t pulling your punches.”

She looks away. “What would be the point?”

His laughter fades. “I guess bait is better than hoping for the Hulk.”

“He’d be good, too.”

She means it as a joke, not a dig. There’s something freeing about just not caring anymore what anyone thinks. Even Bruce.

She’s still looking away when his voice deepens, ragged. “I’ve wanted to see you for a month,” he says and she tightens her fist against her belly, prepared, somehow to find an apology within her grasp, but he continues. “And now I’m sorry you came.”

That hurts like a slap. It shouldn’t, not after what she just said. She deserves it. But she’s feeling raw and exposed and that bites into the softness of her throat.

“Yeah, well, I guess that makes two of us.”

“No, not like that. You didn’t need to go out of your way. I could have saved you the trip. I didn’t want to be more...heartbreak for you.”

She interrupts, “I was suffocating,” she bites out, surprised that it’s true. “Everyone’s in mourning, this whole country that we helped to break. The world we broke. And Steve has just been this shell, clinging to hope, and all I could do was...I don’t even know. Fight.”

He looks at her out of the corner of his eye.

“I’m good at that,” she swallows.

“No one better,” he murmurs.

“Maybe I should have been trying to fuck away the grief instead.”

***

Her eyes flash hot, a persona rising in her features, but the set of her mouth is pure Natasha. Is it an opening? Three years ago (three months ago), he would have passed it by, but now, he has nothing to lose.

“You still can. There’s still a billion or so people who’d be happy to help you with that.”

She turns to him, eyes wide with shock. Genuine surprise.

“Too soon?”

It’s a Stark joke. A Barton barb. The kind of thing that would run through his mind, but remain unsaid.

“I feel like I don’t know who you are anymore.” That makes two of them, but Bruce senses that there’s something here. A way through her pain, at least temporarily.

“Pretend I’m a stranger then.”

She raises an eyebrow.

“Someone you met in the park.”

“A stranger,” she says slowly.

“Someone to help you forget.”

He’s sweating, just a little. He’s not really this guy, would never be the guy someone took home in the middle of the day unless this was some 70’s porno with a hairy professor and a nubile blond.

But she’s looking at him like he’s onto something, so he pushes forward, lowers his voice.

“You look like you could use some company,” he says, and nudges, just a little, into her space.

“You mean I look like I need to be fucked?”

It’s blunt, but the way she says it, the amusement matched by the lush sensuality of her mouth, he knows this is dangerous. That they aren’t really strangers, that she’s his dream and his touchstone, and he’s just a guy that she can’t manipulate, who’s just disappointed her.

It flashes, briefly, in his mind -- that time on her couch, the caution and care, the very delicacy of it as she left him so much space and still filled him up. He has held to that memory so deeply and dearly. It has gotten him through a lot of nights. Can he sacrifice the memory of that intimacy, to give her this?

Her chin waivers, indecision and intrigue. And he thinks, yes.

“You look like you need company,” he says gently. “And maybe not the kind that involves a lot of talking.”

“You don’t owe me anything, Bruce,” she says.

He doesn’t want to break character, doesn’t want to let her think.“It’s not about owing, it’s...for once I can say you’re safe with me, and I know that you moved on, moved forward but…”

She bites her lip like she wants to say something, but he couldn’t really stand it if she did. If she acknowledges that she has. Or worse, that she hasn’t.

Instead, she says, “Your place or mine?”

“You have a place?”

“For a few hours. Which, we only have a few hours.”

He stands, holds out his hand. “Show me.”

***

The suite overlooks the city. It’s expansive. Clean and modern, a few distinct touches from the region grace the walls and the coffee table, but mostly it’s the type of hotel room that could be found anywhere that money is never mentioned, but shapes everything.

Natasha knows these types of rooms inside and out. Parts of her were born in places just like this. Other parts died, were stripped away as she fought to be wholly her own.

She never imagined being in one with Bruce.

It’s not like she hadn’t idly thought about escapes and retreats with him - but those meandering fantasies tended more towards rustic cabins, tiny European chalets, places full of character.

Not somewhere sleek, replete with chrome and pale wood and white sheets so crisp they’ll feel like spring water against her skin.

Even Stark’s modern masterpiece had felt warmer than this.

This suite is bloodless. Private, removed, discreet and utterly without personality. Fitting, considering the broad global deception the Wakandans have been maintaining over generations. Even Natasha had only had a hint that things were very different than they were being presented, and she’d never needed to explore that hint.

Bruce hands her a heavy tumbler of local whiskey. It’s earthy, peatier than the bourbon she drinks once in awhile, although almost never in the mid-afternoon.

He clinks his glass with hers, sealing a pact.

She’s arch, can’t help it. “To day drinking, and fucking the grief away.”

She expects, perhaps, to see him wince, to see sadness or loathing cross his face. Instead, he laughs, a barking sound, hard but pure. No bitter edges.

He swallows the whiskey, and she watches his throat. Now that she’s here with him, the edge of anticipation is starting to thrum under her skin. She can nearly see him as a stranger.

The shorter hair highlights the angularity of his features, the sensual mouth. Ages him a little, but not in a way that she minds. His clothes fit. The white cotton shirt open at the throat, turned up at the forearms, darker khaki pants, decent shoes.

He’d never had a beard before, when they’d been...close.

He looks like he belongs. Maybe here, maybe not. But somewhere. A doppleganger maybe, of someone she’d been intimate with. It’s easier, suddenly, to think of this as an antidote to grief, old habits, choosing a partner in a dark bar for a quick, hard fuck. Her cunt tightens, blood beating in her ears.

She wants this, wants him. Fiercely. She’s maybe never wanted anything this much.

She swallows her drink, sets it down, and moves into his space.

There’s music on, she’s not sure where it came from, but it’s the kind of drummy local hip hop that’s popular in clubs. It’s not romantic, but she can feel it in her bones.

She sways with it a little and his eyes drift shut, head heavy on his neck like he can feel the drum beats and he looks up as she gets into his space.

The music throbs between them, a set of beating hearts and she doesn’t want to wait any longer.

She fists his collar in her hand, and pulls him down to kiss him. Whiskey and beetroot hit her, the softness of his mouth, and she thinks yes, he can be a stranger with the press of lips and sweep of tongue, the little hum as she bites him. Her cheeks heat, and she leans in and he puts his hand on her waist, cradling her, other hand sinking into her hair and she thinks, “No no no…” as desire and memory swamp her.

~*~

_The first time isn’t a date or a grand seduction._

_He sits on her couch, sprawled and weary as she showers off the gore and grim of the fight. And when she comes out of her bedroom, face clean, hair loose around her shoulders, breasts swaying under her cashmere robe, his face is open, defenseless._

_“What?” she asks, wondering if he can voice what’s going through his head, give words to what she can read. She sinks elegantly down onto the sofa next to him, ankle tucked under her body, toes poised on the floor in case she needs to rise as fluidly as she descended._

_She doesn’t want him to feel hemmed in, wants an out for herself without showing him any doubt._

_He looks at her like all of these small executions of control are gifts -- the way she’s just close enough to him that the warm humidity of her skin is palpable, the texture of the cashmere robe, and the line of her exposed clavicle. It’s a tableau, yes, but not a seduction. it’s an honest offer. For him._

_She is allowing him to see her like this, berobed and bare underneath, her curiosity and desire, her hope that he figures it out._

_Which he clearly isn’t going to do if she remains subtle._

_“You’re tired,” she says, and rises a bit to run her thumb along his hairline, leaning into him. She doesn’t steady herself, balanced on her knee. He surprises her, allows his hand to skim along the hem of her robe to cup the back of her knee._

_She stills, fractionally, want and hope fluttering in her belly and cunt at the touch— surprise at his boldness, Heady relief, and then she’s sinks just enough into his touch that he understands it’s permission._

_His expression tightens, and she looks down at him, presses her fingers to his shoulder and he slides his hand along the back of her taut thigh.._

_She hums and holds his gaze as he moves upwards, cashmere displacing, watching her nipples pucker under the robe as he cups the perfect, firm, taut flesh of her right ass cheek._

_Heat floods her eyes, pupils._

_She bites her lower lip, and then effortlessly pulls the knot on her robe so that the sides part._

_He breathes into it, the motion and the luxe luscious skin in front of him, bringing his other hand up to brush the backs of his fingers up her belly, slipping inside the robe to cradle a pink tipped breast._

_They’d been slow. Agonizingly so. He’d needed to be sure -- that touching her wouldn’t be catastrophic, that the risk was worth it. She’d drawn his hand between her breasts, cupped the left as he caressed the right and let her body persuade him._

_Control became an aphrodisiac and by the time she’d arched off the couch, his mouth on her cunt, she’d been quivering with need._

_~*~_

She pushes his jacket off his shoulders, unbuttons his shirt so it hangs open, wanting to rend it, stopping herself. She wants to rush, to hurry, to accelerate this easy sensuality so she doesn’t have time to let it build new memories in her, side by side.

He reacts to her urgency, skims the soft black sweater over her head, tossing it aside on the chair. He unclasps her bra and she fights ridiculous the urge to tell him that this time she’s the one in borrowed clothes. That she’s wearing Wanda’s sweater because she didn’t have anything else that felt appropriate, and now it feels like a costume and she’s not sure she can bear to put it back on.

His jacket has the mark of a Wakandan tailor in the hem. She knows it belonged to someone who hadn’t come back to get it.

So they’re both in the dead’s clothing, then.

The bruises along his ribs are shaped like a fist. She puts her fingers against the brown and yellow marks and he sucks in his breath as she presses harder.

He wraps a hand around hers, but he doesn’t pull her away. She reaches for his pants, unbuttons, unzips, pushes them down his thighs to see his heavy cock.

No underwear.

He’s hardening, erection thick and straining, bobbing a little as he steps awkwardly out of the pile of clothing on the floor, shrugs off his shirt so that he’s naked before her.

She’s still wearing her jeans, bare from the waist up and she wants to take him in hand, bring him off as he moans and pants, wants to keep it impersonal, the kind of rough handling that offers distance and a little pleasure.

Instead, she bends her head and slides his thick shaft along her tongue. He twists his fingers into her hair, thumb on her jaw and instead of pulling away as he thickens, as she coats his cock with spit, he rubs her cheek and encourages her to take him deeper.

Her eyes water as she sucks, takes him in, banding him with ringed fingers, nails rough against his balls before cradling them, squeezing.

He scrapes a thumb over her nipple, rolling it, pinching and it hurts just a little, sweet and sharp and she’s hot and wet with the presumption. She hollows her cheeks, pushing her tongue against the underside of his cock, relaxing her throat and moving up and down on his dick as he cups her breast, thrusts harder so that she’s gagging, spit and pre-come leaking from the sides of her mouth and she wants it all, wants more, wants to choke on his cock.

She tightens her grip, feels him deep in her throat, struggles to breath through her nose and not gag for real, tears leaking out of her eyes, but it’s not enough. She pulls back to suckle a little, changing pressure and catching her breath and looks up at him.

His eyes are shut, hips rolling, mouth open like he’s in pain and she pulls off him completely, a wet, filthy sound that rips a groan from his throat and he opens his eyes.

She thought it would help, sucking him off like this, that he was working with the illusion, fucking her face and realizes instead, that he’s letting her do this, not in reluctance but following her lead, listening to what her body language is telling him and she hates it.

She stands up, unbuttoning her jeans, shoving them over her hips along with her underwear.

“Fuck me,” she says, and turns around. He kisses her shoulder blade, a moment of delicacy that does nothing more than stir her ire. She straightens her spine, body rigid, and he listens. Thank fuck, he listens to what she’s saying.

He pulls her flush against him, his thick weight pressed against the small of her back, smearing against the skin. He grips her hip with one hand, and then reaches around, cupping her cunt.

She’s dripping and he rubs against her lips, sliding between them, parting her and flicking against her clit.

“I’d like to hear you,” he says, low in her ear. The pressure is intense. Her nipples are tight, and she wants him inside of her. He drags his damp fingers along her belly and then pushes her forward over the arm of the couch, reaches over her to snag the loose condom on the cushion.

The sound of the wrapper against his teeth, the breathless wait as he rolls it onto himself ratchet her need up higher and she wishes for a moment that she wasn’t ass up over a white leather couch, that she was naked and prone on that sofa, arms open to him.

Then his hands are on her hips again, pulling her up. The cool latex is between her lips and he thrusts, hard enough that he nearly seats himself inside her on that first fuck.

He’s rough with her, hands bruising on her waist, hips slapping against her ass as he swells inside her. They’d never been like this, never so unrestrained and she just wants more.

She tells him so, begs for it and he shoves her forward so her toes barely touch the floor, spreading her legs wider and fucks her harder.

She gets her hand under her to rub and pinch her clit and he takes his hands away, pressing one to the center of her lower back. She hears a slick wet pop and feels his damp thumb stroking along the pucker of her asshole, stroking and circling, waiting for her permission and she squirms. “Yes,” she says. “Please.” He presses in, and the pressure and intensity builds. She tightens around his cock, furiously working her clit and bucks, climaxing suddenly with a ragged cry.

He slips out of her ass to stroke up her back. She clenches with aftershocks, the teasing overwhelming to her heightened senses. “Tasha,” he murmurs as she starts to settle, and then he leans his weight on her, draping over her back, reaching up to cradle her throat, thumb stroking against her pulse.

He circles his hips as he throbs inside her and she bears down again, feeling another surge of need riding up. She moans and he bites down on the join of her shoulder, and thrusts hard and fast and deep, fucking her through another shuddering orgasm, dots of black and white dancing along the edges of her vision as he gasps her name, “Natasha,” and finishes.

She draws in deep lungfuls of air, gasping and sated, still dizzy and shivering as Bruce kisses her neck, her back, pulls her flush to him to stroke her belly and cunt as she comes down, as she’s held not by a stranger but by someone who she has always trusted to keep her safe, even as he brought the world down around him.

Just like he’s done now.

***

Her thighs are shaking as he holds her, sliding out of her slickness and keeping the condom in place as his cock softens. She stiffens, finally, perhaps at the tenderness, and while he’s loath to let go, he needs to respect her wishes. He brushes his mouth against her shoulder, notes that she doesn’t twitch away and forces himself to step back, to dispose of the condom, locate some water.

He also finds a thick white bathrobe, and when he returns to the living room with it in hand, he finds her sitting on the floor, back against the couch, looking lost.

He squats down, unbothered by his nudity, his flaccid penis or her messy hair and wraps the robe around her.

Being inside her had eradicated any ability he had to pretend they were strangers. She pulls the sides of the robe tighter, looking up at him like she’s not sure where she is and he kneels, pulls her to him, wraps his hand around the back of her head.

Her face is damp, tears or sweat or some combo but she just looks up at him like she doesn’t know where she is, and he figures that a little more awkwardness won’t hurt so he scoops her up, taking her to the wide, white king bed.

She slips her arms into the comically large robe, ties the belt and tucks herself into his side.

“Sleep,” he says.

Surprisingly, she does.

***

Her eyes ache. She’s too hot, and she doesn’t want to move.

She angles her head and tightens her fingers, remembers where she is, drooling on Bruce’s bare chest in a hotel room in the middle of the day. She’d be embarrassed if she had any sort of capacity left for that. But then, she’s never felt shame in front of Bruce.

“Did you really dance?” she mumbles.

His laughter rumbles against her cheek.

“Yeah, and it was every bit as ridiculous as you’re imagining.”

He pets her hair, and she pushes to a sitting position. The afternoon light frames his face, glinting off the mashed curls. He’s still naked.

“How long did I sleep?”

He shrugs. “Maybe 20 minutes. Not long.” He hands her a bottle of water and she drinks greedily.

He looks at her, squinting a little, and then brushes his thumb over the nearly healed cut on her cheek.

“You got hurt.”

“So did you,” she counters.

He looks down at his hands, and then says, “After the fight, the real fight in Wakanda, when we finally went to bed, I couldn’t sleep. I don’t think any of us could, but I couldn’t get comfortable, even to rest.”

She shifts so that she’s sitting on her heels. It’d been a bad night all around. They’d been offered rooms in the palace, but had ended up sleeping on the floor in one of the suites. Her back pressed to Steve, eyes on the others.

“I got up, finally, walked around and realized that my shoulder hurt. Really hurt.”

She remembers now. Closing her eyes briefly, opening them up to find Bruce gone. Panicking until he’d come back with his arm in a sling. She hadn’t seen him again until the next night and a few days later, he’d left with the delegation.

“It’d been more than a decade,” he says quietly. “Since I really got hurt. Since anything stuck.”

Oh. Of course.

“He’s still there Nat, but...I’m on my own for the first time and I know that you need him. That you want him to come to the fight, but I…” He swallows hard.

“It’s the only chance I may get, and I want to remember what I can do. Banner. Not Hulk. While there’s still time. Because when he comes back, there won’t be any more me. No Banner. Just Hulk. That’s the deal. When he’s needed, and I just wanted one more chance...”

It’s an echo of what he’d said in the park, but she hears him this time and she feels the tears well again. He’d tried to tell her. He’d been trying before he left. She just hadn’t wanted to see.

She unties the robe, tosses it off the bed and climbs into his lap, takes his face in her hands.

He slowly encircles her waist.

“So that’s what this has been about? Fighting? Fucking? Helping?”

***

She’s so warm in his arms. Soft, solid, beautiful. But he’s done pretending that they’re strangers. Change and distance haven’t made them strangers, it’s just offered up a veil that he needs to tear down. He needs to be honest, although he doesn’t want to be cruel.

“The girl, Wanda, when she…” He doesn’t want to say dissolved, disappeared, died. He doesn’t have words for the way they shattered into nothingness. “I was still stuck in the suit. I couldn’t feel my fingers. Just this numb tingling. And I thought, ‘This is how it ends. Even if he came out now, he couldn’t stop it.’ I don’t think anything could.”

She’s still looking down at him, straddling his lap, cradling his face but he can’t meet her gaze. He’s not sure if he should continue. But eventually, he decides that he owes her this truth. His skin doesn’t fit well enough to hide behind.

“It was a relief,” he says. “I hadn’t wanted to die in a very long time. Or at least I hadn’t thought about it as a possibility, but I was in my own body again and I’d done my goddamned best and I was ready.”

She looks away now, her jaw set hard, and she didn’t ask for compassion. He’s not sure she’ll even accept it, but he can’t her leave alone with this weight she’s bearing.

He strokes her back. “But I didn’t die. And I had to decide what my life would mean, then. How I’d use it.”

“Like this,” she swallows hard and he turns his face, kisses her palm.

“We didn’t get a choice about surviving, about being the ones left behind.”

“I’ve been missing things,” she says slowly, like she’s coming to terms with an idea. “Losing time. So focused on how to get everyone back so I didn’t have to think about losing them.”

He brushes her hair from her face, fingering the edges like he’d done when her hair was red and he could curl it around his fingers, runs his thumb over the cut on her cheek.

“I didn’t know,” she says, “didn’t realize.” He nods with her as she struggles to voice her heartaches, awe and anguish cracking her low tones.

“I’d have traded my life for any of them,” she says, and realizes that it’s the first time she’s said it out loud instead of just living it. “For Nate or Coop or Lila. For Wanda or Sam. For any of these…”

“I know,” he says softly.

“It’s so fucking unfair,” she says, and there are tears on her cheeks now, nose red. “That I should have been left behind. Everything I’ve done and I didn’t deserve...”

He pulls her tight against him, his own tears hot on her shoulder and wants to laugh at himself, naked and pressed against this woman who has been his salvation, who has been a dream, but who is warm and real in his arms, and they’re both falling apart. Her shoulders shake.

”It’s okay,” he croons. “It’s okay, it’s okay.”

She hiccups, “It’s really fucking not,” as he chokes on the watery laughter.

She doesn’t gasp and sob, too many years of discipline and training to keep people from seeing, but the emotion coursing through her is real, messy and brutal and unlovely. He rocks her against him, wiping his own tears into her hair, kissing her cheek, her neck, trying so goddamned hard to offer comfort. She tilts her face, and captures his mouth.

Her face is slick and salty with tears and probably some snot, but he kisses her back, hard and fierce and yearning, hands digging into her hair, desperate suddenly, in a way he hadn’t been before when it had just been sex.

She surges against him, and he’s hardening again. He cups her breast, squeezing as she moans into his mouth, clawing at his shoulders. It feels so good, the pain and pleasure together as she tightens her thighs over his hips and rocks against his cock. He bends to take her nipple in his mouth, grazing it then biting, just hard enough that she throws her head back and he surges up, mouth on her throat as she rises to take him in hand, pumping him twice and then seating him against her wet cunt.

He thrusts up as she sinks down and it’s so goddamned good, grief and loss and love pounding through them as she rides him, hips bucking. It’s not enough though. She’s whimpering with need, and he hauls her up, rolling them over and getting her leg over his shoulder to fuck into her harder and deeper, still seeking out her mouth as she pulls his hair.

His eyes water and he buries his face against her shoulder, thrusting and thrusting. He’s so close and the friction feels so good, too good, the slick of her cunt is too perfect against his cock. “No condom,” he gasps, pulling out as she yanks on his chest hair saying, “Fuck,” and “come here.” She reaches for his erection, but he bats her hands away, yanks her hips up so she’s against his mouth, shoulders on the bed and sucks her cunt, tongue and lips and teeth nipping and lathing her as she screams, fists in his hair, pulling so hard his eyes water and she comes all over his face.

He collapses against her thigh while she pets his head, his fingers sticky on her thigh. He feels the laughter burble up in her belly and he looks up at her. She bites her lip. “Everything still taste funny?” she asks and his bark of laughter surprises them both with the sheer joy of it.

They shower together in relative quiet, soaping each other, enjoying the last remnants of uncomplicated touch.

She strokes his face as the water pours down his back and says, “I like the beard.”

“The Other Guy wasn’t much for the growing out process, before,” he says. “I’ve learned to be petty in my old age.”

She presses a kiss to his heart. “You’ve always been petty, Bruce.”

And he pulls her to him so tightly he’s not sure how he’s going to let go.

As they dress, he says, “I just need a little time. And I know this afternoon, nothing’s really changed. Between us.”

“Hasn’t it?” she says, but it’s true. An afternoon of fucking and revelations doesn’t really change three years of absence, of hurt and heartbreak and life continuing.

He gives her that sideways smile that has always made her a little breathless, yet another thing she’s kept close and for once, she lets him see it.

“There’s stuff to talk about,” she agrees. “But also, I want to be near you. I want to be part of the time that Banner has left.”

It’s a startlingly blunt admission, and he takes it as such, sits on the bed and holds her hand while she looks down at him.

“What if I’m really not the guy that you wanted to run away with?” he asks.

“Then I’ll figure out who you are,” she says. “And who I am. And if those two people can build something together. Plus, we’ve got the sex part worked out.”

He smirks at her. She licks her bottom lip.

“I need to find Clint,” she says. “I’ve tried letting him come back to us. I wanted to be there for Steve, and Clint’s grief has always had a blast radius, but I...just...I can’t let him be out there anymore, alone.”

Bruce stands up, and hugs her and she holds on for as long as she can, the warmth seeping into her bones.

They leave the suite with five minutes to spare, just enough time for her to walk across the street and take the elevator to the roof.

Okoye is at the controls, which surprises her.

“You didn’t bring your doctor back?”

“He’s doing good work. He’ll be there when we need him.”

She gives Natasha an assessing look. “Your time was well spent.”

Natasha pulls out her phone, and calls Steve. “I’m coming home,” she says when he answers. “Alone. Also, you’re such a dick.”

“Is Bruce okay?”

She shakes her head. “No one’s okay,” she says.

And Steve nods. She touches her fingers to the screen. “It’ll be good to see Stark,” she says, and Steve gives her that tired smile, real and warming and says, “I’ve really missed you Nat.”

 

 

 


End file.
